Categories

Sunday, February 24, 2013

I'm going to step aside from talking about the Harlem Shake and instead talk about the next best thing: the To This Day Project by Shane Koyczan. It is a 7-minute long video in which Shane Koyczan recounts his bullied childhood and how it affected him. In addition, he reflects on numerous other cases with classmates and friends, and how confronting bullying is such a hard thing to do, yet it is so important to accomplish. This is an amazing video illustrated by a myriad of art mediums and narrated by a poem that Koyczan himself wrote. I was awed by the simple beauty of this video and the profundity of the message that follows.

If you were as touched by this video as I was, please share it!

The awful truth is that out of the millions who watched this video, a good chunk would have been vulnerable to its message. After all, the majority of us have been both the bully and the victim at one point. Or a subtle action or a few words might have hurt someone way more than we intended. However many of us could relate to this video, it is really hard to change people and the way we behave towards others. I would love to live in a utopian world where bullying and the like don't exist, but that simply isn't possible. People (including myself) take too much comfort in being safe and unnoticed by the bullies by the overarching shelter of pack mentality. It is really hard to step out of your comfort zone, walk up to a "bully" and say, "hey, stop that", even when we have played it out again and again in our heads.

I merely hope that this video- even if only for an instant- lets you come to terms with how seemingly "okay" actions might have affected someone, and you wouldn't even know it. Maybe it doesn't hurt to smile at some of your classmates or colleagues more, or ask how they're doing.

Hope you guys enjoyed this video and how it was beautifully rendered. Thank you!

Sunday, February 10, 2013

My mom's been infatuated with TED videos lately. She sent me this one a few days back and said I should definitely watch it. I obligingly did, and it was one of the best TED talks I've seen.

The speaker in the video, Amy Cuddy, is a highly qualified professor and researcher at Harvard Business School (source: ted.com) She studies how "non-verbal behaviour and snap judgements affect people from the classroom to the boardroom", which she referred to immensely in her TED talk.

Cuddy discusses how body language is one of the strongest indicator in confidence or insecurity. If you're feeling particularly powerful, you might have your chest out, feet apart and facing outward, chin up, etc. Sure, we've all heard this before. But what makes Cuddy's case so intriguing is that the relationship between body language and self-confidence works both ways. She observes that putting your body in a "power pose" for a couple of minutes will increase testosterone (upping your confidence) and decrease cortisol (lowering your stress levels). Accordingly, positioning yourself in a low-power pose (shoulders hunched, body caving inward arms together) for a few minutes will have the opposite effect on your testosterone and cortisol levels.

Cuddy advices that before a stress-inducing event such as an exam or a job interview, you should place yourself in these power poses (discussed in the video below) as it will noticeably improve your self-confidence. Personally, I found this to be a fascinating link between our physical bodies and the way our brain works. It is incredible the sort of research Cuddy has done and I definitely hope she and other researchers further their experiments to find more relationships between body language and our psyche.

Feel free to check out an earlier post of mine regarding a TED talk on "The art of choosing"! It is another amazing talk that you can't miss.